Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great 17th-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine.
Detail from a portrait by Charles Le Brun
Coat of arms of the Corneille family, which dates back to 1637
Home of the Corneille family in Rouen, where Corneille was born. It was turned into a museum dedicated to his work in 1920.
Corneille at the Louvre
Tragedy is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis, or a "pain [that] awakens pleasure,” for the audience. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.
Mask of Dionysus. Greek, Myrina, 2nd century BCE.
Scene from the tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. Roman fresco in Pompeii.
Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911) King Lear, Cordelia's Farewell
French actor Talma as Nero in Racine's Britannicus.